GROUSE AND RED-DEER.
THIS year, as in too many years of our deceitful climate, the long waiting for the spring which came so tardily seemed like that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. It delayed considerably the nesting of most of our birds in the South, and caused their broods to fail in some instances and almost always to fall below their usual strength. Those which laid later had a better chance than the earlier nesters, whose eggs, before the mother bird began to sit upon them, were exposed to the worst severity of the spring frosts. How severe these were may be indicated by the fact that in the Midlands the night temperature went down to twelve degrees of frost on April 26th, and that the average for the month was four degrees of frost as the minimum night temperature. These observations are taken from an English grouse moor in a position which makes them fairly typical of the month's temperatures all over the Midlands. Curiously enough, in conditions such as these the English and Welsh grouse hatched out well. There are two rather critical moments for the eggs and young of birds laying in open nests such as grouse : the moment before the mother begins to sit, when the eggs have not the protection of her body's warmth, and the time when the young birds become so large that she cannot cover them adequately. Most of our English and Southern grouse's eggs seem to have escaped the peril of the former moment better than we could have hoped that they would do; and by the time that the young birds had come to any size the severity of the cold, though still considerable,
was much mitigated, so that for all that part of the king- dom the prospects look favourable for the grouse stock generally. A little more to the north—that is to say, in the South of Scotland—it appears that the cold did inflict much loss on the young stock and eggs ; but further north again, as in Perthshire and onwards, the accounts are once more much better, probably because the grouse had not begun to lay so early there. The cold retarded the commencement of the nesting, and the eggs were therefore not exposed to the same peril as if they had been earlier laid. The sitting birds seem almost impervious to cold, although there are instances of their being frozen to death on their eggs, and many of them were terribly soaked this year by the very heavy rains in May.
The grouse on the Scottish hills, among the heather, are in their native habitat. If they suffer from the inclemencies of weather, it is, after all, in the course of their natural heritage. There is, however, another denizen of the Scottish hills, the red-deer, so closely associated with that environment in our minds that we are very apt to forget that it is not by any means the environment which is natural for him, and he is prone to suffer a great deal more heavily than the grouse from the severities of weather, especially from any prolonged period of snow. The snow not only benumbs him with its cold, but it covers up his food-supplies and gives him a wet bed to lie on. He has no refuge. In the habitat which is really natural to him be has refuges in plenty, for by nature be is a woodland animal, living where he can obtain that shelter which never entirely fails in a sylvan district, where, moreover, berbage is never entirely buried beneath the snow. Even if we did not know this to be the fact, it might easily be established by comparing the size and condition of the deer which we find on the bare hills of Scotland with those of Continental Europe. The latter are almost twice as heavy, and their heads are correspondingly finer. Doubtless the difference in the pasture and the shelter is enough in itself to account even for so great a difference as this in the deer which live in the respectively different environments; but it is quite likely that the inbreed- ing of the deer on the Scottish hills, and the evil of shooting all the best stags and leaving an enormous number of hinds to eat up the pasture, have been large factors in helping the deterioration of the general stock. That this deteriora- tion of Scottish red-deer is not final, that it can be checked by giving them more favourable circumstances, in spite of the generations of inbreeding, is proved by the fact that red- deer exported from Scotland to New Zealand, without any special precautions taken to secure choice specimens or any change of blood after their importation, have thriven so finely that their stock actually rivals the big beasts of the forests of Continental Europe. Some have asked whether New Zealand, supposing that its first red-deer had been importations from Germany instead of from Scotland, would have shown us a type of deer as much bigger than the German as its present deer are bigger than their Scottish progenitors. The answer has almost certainly to be in the negative. The question itself ran hardly be asked seriously. No doubt it suggests a curious line of speculation, but there seems to be a certain typical size which Nature has fixed as a rough maximum for the species as now established, and by no change or favour of environment are we to expect to breed stags the size of elephants. None the less, it is sure that the question of feeding is one of the first importance, and it is for this reason that one regrets to see the vast numbers of hinds with which the Scottish hills are generally covered in the deer forest regions. About this point there is a good deal of mis- conception. People are prone to argue that Scotland's bills are wide; and that is true enough, and if all the Scottish hills were clad with fine pasture there would be feed enough and to spare for stags and hinds and all. This, however, is very far from being the case. The true fact is that, except when there has been some rain just at the time of the best growth of the grass, the only feed worth the trouble of picking up is along the little ravines which bold the moisture and on choice hillsides, which on most forests are very much more the exception than the rule. Reckoning the pasture on this basis, which is the only solid basis on which it can be reckoned, it is seen at once that there is none too much of it, in spite of the wide extent of the Scottish hills, for the many deer which range on them.
The wonder, really, is not that the stock of our Scottish
red-deer should be deteriorating, as they certainly have been deteriorating until the last few years, when some energetic measures have been taken to arrest that lamentable process, but that, seeing what the conditions are, and how different from those which are properly natural for red-deer, they should succeed in combating them as well as they do. The past spring has been unusually trying for them. Generally speak• ing, they are reported to have borne the trial well. On some forests where hand-feeding is only a last resort a good many stage are said to have perished because of their reluctance, which is shown so often, to come down to the feed. On the forests where hand-feeding in winter is more the rule than the exception the hinds seem to have suffered more heavily than the stags ; but in either case, as has been seen so often before, the deer have shown a wonder- ful ability to face a very rigorous spring, because they had had a mild winter before it. When the winter is rigorous the deer are in an enfeebled condition, which 'gives them little chance if a really hard spring succeeds it ; but if they have passed through the winter without any very severe trial, they have much more power of endurance. This, of course, is all very natural, and much in accord with what we might expect to be the case ; but what is not natural in the eyes of the man who has been spending days of toil in vain attempts to get within rifle-shot of one of the monarchs of the glen is to perceive the very creepers torn off the wall of the lodge, and to be told that the deer did that when they came down off the bill in winter. That the creatures which could thus come and pluck the bare boughs of the creeping plants off the very wall of the lodge can be of the same species as the intensely shy animals which he has been vainly endeavouring to approach on the heights seems to the stalking amateur a pro- position very difficult of credence. None the less, it is true, and it is only necessary to realise in some degree the aspect of these hills when the snow lies on them for weeks together to understand that the pastoral animals which graze on them might well be driven to the farms and cottages like domestic cattle. This year the stress has been less severe than in many former years, but it has been severe enough to cause many deaths and much suffering for the survivors. It is too soon to make a very accurate forecast of events in the stalking season, but it is likely that the deer will be late in coming into con- dition, and likely also that they will be light. As for the heads, that seems to be a matter mainly dependent on rather later circumstances.
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